The introduction to this collection of poetry says that Edna St. Vincent Millay has been criticized for not being sufficiently "modernist". He poems are too sentimental, too easy-to-read, and borrow too much from 18th century styles. Well the critics might be right but I love this poetry and plan to read more.
Her most famous lines are here "My candle burns at both ends...it gives a lovely light", her first famous poem is here "Renascance"--this spooky poem gained her a mentor and an education at Vassar--and also present are poems from "Fatal Interview" and "Epitath for the Race of Man". My favorite poems are the short ones that talk of love: these are the easy-to-read poems dismissed by the critics.
If you read this poem then you must read the potrait of Edna St. Vincent Millay in "The New Yorker" and the memoir "The Shores of Light" by Edmund Wilson, the later book reviewer for The New Yorker magazine.
Edmun Wilson was just one of ESVM many jilted suitors. But she let him down gently her said. His book describes how he found work for her at Vanity Fair magazine. ESVM evidently charmed all the men she came in touch with. The editor of Vanity Fair complained that he could not have both of his editors in love with the same contributor to the magazine.
Many of the ESVM poems here have to do with nature, like the poem "Spring". Perhaps this is because she moved out of Greenwich Village to the country and there she wrote collections such as "The Buck in Snow". When she got married and left the city she didn't lose touch with her circle of fans and hangers-on including Edmun Wilson. Wilson describes here there at her farm reciting her poetry--she knew all her poems by heart--to wide-eyed admirers.
Alot of her poems here have no title. I imagine she might have felt that the title could be a distraction to a poem. If you can't think of a good one then don't create one at all.
Finally, feminists certainly will be upset with lines like "I, being born a woman and distressed By all the needs and notions of my kind..." But this is good stuff and lets us peer inside the female heart. They are just like us men it appears "...feel a certain zest to bear your body's weight upon my breast". This stuff is just as erotic and passionate as Shakespeare's sonnets and lyric poems--well not quite but good enough.
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